What is cotton: all about cotton fiber. Growing and harvesting cotton

Now cotton harvesting is in full swing in Uzbekistan. From whatever city you leave, drive a few kilometers and see fields of dry bushes covered with cotton wool. I left Tashkent in the direction of Samarkand in order to photograph the cleaning process. A little general information for those who, like me, had never seen cotton growing before traveling to Uzbekistan. Cotton grows in the fields on small bushes about waist high.
To put it simply, these are just pieces of cotton wool on branches.
Before harvest, water is not supplied to the fields. Therefore, the cotton plant dries up. The “cotton wool” itself ripens in the so-called box. In this photo, the box has dried up and opened (perhaps in reverse order).
This is the box I opened up myself. It was green and completely closed.
That day was not without adventure. I left Tashkent and about 10 km from the city stopped near a large cotton field, where just a bunch of people were working. I approached the field and just managed to ask a couple of questions to the guys who worked there, and take a few shots, when a man approached me and said that it was strictly forbidden to film the cotton harvest. He asked who I was and what I was doing here. I said everything as it is - they say, a tourist, I take pictures. A minute later, another man came up and introduced himself as the owner of the field, said that it was private property, photography was not allowed, and he called the police. I called on my mobile, two more arrived - one in civilian clothes, the second in uniform. The one in uniform showed his ID and called himself a district police officer. They started asking if I had permission, why I was taking pictures, and so on. They even said that now they would take me to the prosecutor’s office :) But I know that I didn’t do anything especially criminal and I have nothing to be afraid of. We stood, talked, they talked for a long time in Uzbek, the district policeman called someone on his mobile for a long time. As a result, they asked me to remove the four frames that I did. And they said that without official permission they could not allow me to take pictures. That permission must be obtained from the Khokimiyat of the Tashkent region (such as the mayor's office or administration in Russian) from some Rustam-aka. Moreover, the man who advised me to do this asked me not to tell the Hakimiyat that it was he who sent me. Why it was forbidden to film the cotton harvest, he did not know. All this lasted no more than half an hour, and ended up with one of them giving me a lift to a taxi stand so that I could leave for Tashkent. But I did not go to Tashkent, but to the next field, where no one forbade filming. The problem is that schoolchildren pick cotton in some fields in Uzbekistan. For about 2 weeks a year, every day they go not to school, but to the field. It would seem that this is so - well, the kids will work with their hands, stay on fresh air- will be healthier. In the end, we, Russian schoolchildren, were also sent to weed carrots during summer practice at school, and I remember this fun time only with good feelings, and curricula can be redistributed. But all sorts of human rights activists use this as an opportunity to reproach Uzbekistan for using child labor. Therefore, the organizers of cleaning are not very fond of people with cameras. Be that as it may, no one forbade me to take pictures in the neighboring field. The field size is 2.5 hectares. I counted 30 people who pick cotton - no more than 3 of them are men, about 8 children, the rest are women.
Women cover their faces with scarves. Firstly, protecting from the sun, and secondly, to breathe less dust from dry land.

The collected cotton is folded into such a knot, which is tied to a belt. When it's full enough, it's comfortable to sit on. This woman picked 118 kilograms of cotton the previous day. Collectors are paid 130 soums for 1 kilogram. That is, over the past day, the woman earned about 15 thousand soums, which is about 6 dollars at the current exchange rate. I plucked one bush and scored this much. The leaves and the box are dry and prickly, so you need to work with gloves.
It is planned to harvest 120 tons of cotton from this field. So far, only 20 have been collected.
As I said, children help their parents and do not look tortured and oppressed.
Mother with daughter. With daughter and son. Write down the address where to send photos. I often do this - print photos, and then send them by regular mail. Sometimes this is the only way to persuade a person to take a picture. It's funny how children's faces change when you take a picture of them. I took this picture unexpectedly for a boy.
And he had already managed to prepare for the next one - he stood at attention and assumed a serious expression on his face. By the way, not only children do this, but also many adults.

The collected cotton is carried to the trailer.

So much has been collected today.
Weigh. And write down the results in a notebook.

"White gold", "wood wool" - for more than a century, cotton was the main wealth and the main curse of Central Asia, which changed its face in order. A trip to the Fergana Valley, about the structure and color of which I was, I specially guessed for the cotton harvesting season, although this topic itself is wider than the Valley and even than the whole of Uzbekistan.

In the treatises of scientists of medieval Europe, among the wonders of the East, the mysterious creature "sheep", also known as the "Scythian lamb" or "Tatar ram", appeared - perhaps the most famous example of a mythical zoophyte, that is, a half-animal, half-plant. A ram was a tree or a bush, the fruits of which were small sheep that fed on its foliage, and according to a "lighter" version - just a tree covered with a fleece skin. After all, the Europeans knew that white wool was brought from the East, and that this wool grows on trees:

Actually cotton (its Russian name for "cotton at "has nothing to do and is borrowed from the West Slavic languages, where it means rather "klok") really was not known to the Greeks until the campaigns of Macedonian, to Europeans - before the wars with the Arabs, and in Europe itself there was simply nowhere to grow. But in Asia and South America it has been cultivated for about 7000 years, and independently of each other, the "ram" was tamed by people in several places, the first of which was the Indus Valley. The purpose of cotton did not change - fabrics were made from it, and the same English cloth turned "wood wool" into "white gold". It's no secret that capitalist industrialization always begins with the textile industry, even now in countries like Bangladesh, even in not so good Old England, where by the 16th century "sheep ate people" in the pastures of my lords. Wood wool proved to be a worthy substitute for sheep fleece, and the search for places for cotton plantations was not the last reason for British colonial expansion. In the 18th century, two main cotton regions of the planet formed - the southeast of North America and India. The first one eventually went to the United States, which has significantly succeeded in the cotton business thanks to the cotton gin miracle machine. And when in the 19th century the textile industry began to gain momentum in Russia, American cotton was enough for all these manufactories that grew like mushrooms from Bryansk to Kostroma and factories of strict merchants from yesterday's peasants. At that time, cotton was not grown in Turkestan, but Russian geographers and researchers brought news to St. Petersburg that there was just the right place for this culture.

However, the same cotton gin played a role both in the industrialization of the Northern States and in the preservation of slavery in the Southern States, but in the same 1861, when Alexander II abolished serfdom in Russia, the contradictions between slave owners and capitalists aggravated across the ocean broke through civil war. At that time, Russia was slowly pushing the Kokand Khanate to the south, enticing the Kazakhs and Kirghiz to its side, Central Asia itself, bogged down in the virgin Middle Ages, seemed very easy prey, from the south, from India, the British looked at it, and the humiliated Crimean War Russian officers were so eager to get even with them... The American crisis, as it was called in the then press, threatened to leave Russia without the main supply of cotton, and thus made the invasion of Turkestan the most economic expediency. And although the conquest of Turkestan was not a matter of one day or one year, and by the time when the white-blue-red flags were flying over Khiva and Kokand, America successfully coped with its crisis and again began to export "white gold", still the formation in Russian Turkestan, a new cotton granary became a matter of time.

First, however, it was necessary to lay railway, which only in 1899 connected the Ferghana Valley with the Caspian port of Krasnovodsk, and at the beginning of the 20th century directly with Russia through the Kazakh steppe, and simply settled down in a foreign land. But since the beginning of the 20th century, cotton growing in Central Asia has been developing at a frantic pace, the sown area alone in 1890-1915 increased by 7 times, and this was a purely capitalist project, where the state created a favorable regime as a last resort. By the beginning of the First World War, the country provided itself with cotton for more than half of its needs, and more than 60% of Russian cotton production was in the Ferghana Valley.

It is interesting that 60% of cotton production was held by no means by fat-bellied Russian capitalists and not even by foreign investors wrapped in cigars, which, it seems, were not there at all, but by local merchants from Armenians and Bukharan Jews, such as the Vadyaevs or the Poteliahovs. The cotton capital of Turkestan, followed by its banking center, was Kokand, where, towards the exit from the Valley, white threads converged from Namangan, Andijan, Margilan or Osh. The main street of Kokand, formed by the cotton boom, is perhaps the best architectural ensemble of Russian Turkestan. For example, on the right is Vadyaev’s house, on the left is the Russian-Asian Bank:

And here is the largest Vadyev cotton plant in Turkestan, also located somewhere in Kokand. In total, by 1915, 235 cotton factories operated in Turkestan, with which oil factories were usually associated - we are talking, of course, about cottonseed oil with its characteristic meat flavor, without which pilaf is unthinkable. In 1916, on the eve of falling into the abyss, a very significant event happened (if everything had developed as before) - the Turkestani Vadyaev bought a large manufactory in Ivanovo-Voznesensk.

Russian capital, of course, was also very noticeable in Turkestan. Here, for example, in Bukhara, and caravanserais - Savva Morozov's Trading House (1912), the owner - factories:

The cotton boom brought out of hibernation even the protectorates - the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Khiva. For example, over the roofs and walls of the gloomy old Khiva, the pipes of a cotton gin plant, founded in 1907 by the local vizier-Europeanizer Islam Hajja, hang over the roofs and walls. Highly tsarist Russia is on "Letters about Tashkent".

However, even before the revolution, cotton crops expanded at the expense of grain crops, and the interruptions in grain supplies caused by the First World War were not the last reason for the Great Turkestan uprising. The same mistake, in general, was repeated by the Soviets, but they approached the cotton project on an order of magnitude larger scale, deploying a grandiose melioration program in Central Asia in the 1930s and 60s, penetrating its desert with thousands of canals, the total length of which no one probably knows .

A familiar part of the Central Asian landscape - lonely excavators in the steppe, near canals invisible from the road:

And the most famous payment for this is the death of the Aral Sea ... although everything with it, of course, is not so simple:

Other events are much less known - the mass migration of peoples, in some places similar to deportation. Yes and Crimean Tatars, Meskhetians or Kurds were not accidentally thrown from their native places not into the desert, but into oases - the area of cotton plantations grew faster than the number of hands ready to cultivate them. And here, for example, is an abandoned mountain village (Tajikistan) - the last Sogdians lived here, the most unique of the small peoples of Central Asia, and now they, forgetting the language, live in the Zafarabad region, and only a few hundred Yaghnobis returned here:

But parya, in fact, Central Asian Indians, who came here as gypsies, but settled in the mountains as farmers, apparently have sunk into oblivion - neither in Denau, nor in, between which they lived, no one knows about them now. But we stopped by the aksakal of the Tajik-khumpari - mountaineers who were resettled in the Yangi-Khayot cotton state farm (" New life"). Highlanders from and Uzbeks from the northern regions of Tajikistan determined the appearance and, that is, their resettlement was one of the prerequisites for the Tajik civil war.

But cotton, like our bread, was "the head of everything" here, and the famous word "Pakhtakor" means nothing more than "Cotton grower". On - the grave of the famous football team Pakhtakor, which died in a plane crash in 1979:

And the "cotton business" was a landmark event in the late USSR, a kind of foreshadowing of Perestroika, and cost the life of Sharaf Rashidov, the then leader of the Uzbek SSR, who either died of a heart attack or committed suicide. In the frame below - his study-museum in. Whether Rashidov was really to blame is not for me to judge (in modern Uzbekistan, the cotton business is considered almost Andropov repression), but legends were made about corruption in the cotton industry in Central Asia.

In today's Uzbekistan, cotton production is declining year by year - and not so much because of economic problems, but because of the redistribution of land for bread and other food crops. And the basis of the Uzbek economy has long been Agriculture, and non-ferrous metallurgy, primarily gold and uranium. The USSR was among the top three in cotton production, squeezing the maximum out of Central Asian land that was not the most suitable for this; Uzbekistan, which provided 60% of the cotton industry of the Union, at the time of gaining independence, ranked 4th in the world after such giants as India, the USA and China. Since then, it has moved to sixth place, behind Pakistan and Brazil, but still ranks second (after the US) in terms of exports - about 10% of the world market. And in autumn, its landscape cannot be imagined without white sparks of cotton in brown-green fields:

The local authorities really don't like it when someone walks around and photographs these fields, and twice the drivers of collective taxis, with quite sincere fear, refused to stop at the field so that I could photograph it. But near Andijan, our fellow traveler was an old female doctor, who until her retirement worked in a departmental polyclinic of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and, therefore, was familiar with all police officers in the region. Under such guardianship, the driver with a broad gesture suggested that we take a walk in the cotton field, look at the national heritage of Uzbekistan:

Cotton is not a grass, but a bush, and earlier it grew much higher. The minting of cotton, that is, the removal of its upper shoot, from which it began to grow in breadth, and much thicker, was invented, by the way, by the same Trofim Lysenko, who was thrice cursed by all post-Soviet science for the defeat of genetics. Cotton seeds grow in characteristic pods, in a half-closed state, such a one fell on the title frame, filmed in the same field. A seed in a box is surrounded by dense white cotton wool, which at some point bursts its walls. And at this moment, cotton begins to be harvested:

And Central Asia, especially Uzbekistan, cannot be understood without the spectacle of cotton fields during the season of suffering, or rather, without its subtext.
Although in theory there are cotton harvesters, here "wood wool" is 9/10 harvested by hand, and people bending their backs in the endless fields - in the fall an integral part of the landscape, even in the Valley, even in Khorezm, even near Samarkand:

This is hashar - this is how the mobilization of the people for some socially useful cause was called in Central Asia from time immemorial, whether it was restoring a house to a neighbor who had suffered a fire or building fortress walls and digging canals. Or, for example, a large-scale reconstruction of the city center, which I observed two years ago in. Cotton is harvested in Uzbekistan using the hashar method, and most of the people in these photographs are not peasants from the surrounding villages at all:

In fact, this is forced labor, to which underage schoolchildren were involved a few years ago - one of the most inconvenient topics in post-Soviet Uzbekistan, so the undesirability of a person with a camera in these fields is quite natural. Fighters against cotton hashars, who are trying to tell the whole world about what is happening, are a special kind of Uzbek dissidents, driving local officials to white heat. For example, here are two materials from Lenta.ru, or a sharper one from Fergana.ru. I didn’t want to take risks, and didn’t meddle in the fields - that’s why all the shots with hashars were taken from the window of a collective taxi or train:

The main contingent of hashars are state employees and students who are sent here from organizations, usually on weekends. Declassed elements also work here - some within the framework of "15 days", others are under threat of remembering old things. Others, who are richer, quite legally pay off by hiring a mardikor (day laborer) instead of themselves - but there are few of them in Central Asia, and will not so rich colleagues respect him after that? In today's Uzbekistan, about 5 million people pass through cotton hashars every year, that is, 1/6 of the country's population, and given that average age Pakhtakor is 23 years old, at least once in his life almost everyone here harvested cotton

The daily norm is 50-60 kilograms per person, and the small salary formally due for this work actually goes to lodging and meals at a fixed rate. If an employee does not comply with the norm, then it is completely at the expense of fines, so he remains to eat and sleep at his own expense. Someone is brought to the fields for 2 weeks, someone - for the weekend; working day from 9 to 18 with a break for lunch, not counting the road, and the road in both directions can take a few more hours.

So, and even worse, it was in Soviet time: I heard (but I can’t vouch for the authenticity), it got to the point that the police stopped regular buses and sent their passengers to an hour hashar. Here are the memories from the comments to this post:
She herself was on cotton many times - both at school (starting from the 7th grade), and at the university, and after that, when she worked. This is a real disaster. Slavery pure water without any human rights. The working day is from dark to dark, seven days a week, in any weather except rain and snow. When the weather was bad for a long time, they fed only once a day. And all this from the beginning of the harvest to the "plan" - up to the notorious 6 million tons (rarely it was less than a month, more often 1.5, sometimes even 2 months). I calculated that I spent about a year on cotton (consider slavery). Just terrible numbers. The unsanitary conditions are terrible. No medicine. The dean of our faculty died on cotton from a banal appendicitis, tk. he could not be diagnosed immediately at the local hospital. They poisoned people with defoliants - that muck that was sprinkled on the fields for the leaves to fall. People picked cotton in the field, and neighboring fields or even the edge of the same one are cultivated. And the wind can suddenly blow in the direction of the collectors. Corruption and other matters were not even hidden from us students. For example, a teacher sent part of the students to pick pure cotton, while the rest collected the so-called. "selection" - cotton from the bushes along with boxes and from the ground along with leaves and twigs - and said: "We will bake pies." Cotton carts were called pies, in which earth was poured down, picking in the middle, and pure cotton was poured from the edges and handed over to khirman as clean.
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Or here's another one:
I learned about the existence of school autumn holidays only in Leningrad. spring break - a couple of days. the rest of the time on weeding. But there, at least without an overnight stay, after dinner.

Cotton Express in Kokand, and on the roads in the fall, columns of minibuses with the word "Buttermilk" under glass are not uncommon:

Often this word is also on the plates with which they meet closed doors other state institutions. For example, we didn’t get into museums twice, all the workers of which at that time bent their backs in the fields:

And the harvested raw cotton is slightly similar to Vasily Vereshchagin's painting "The Apotheosis of War":

In the autumn in Uzbekistan, there used to be a fuel crisis with long queues at gas stations - the state monopoly on the gasoline trade turned into the fact that all the fuel went to equipment working in the cotton fields. The most colorful representative of this technique, of course, its diesel segment, is the characteristic three-wheeled tractors with a high landing, modifications of Belarusian and Vladimir tractors, produced by the Tashkent Tractor Plant:

The car from the frame above was photographed in the spring, that is, it apparently cultivated the field. They work in principle not only on cotton:

And on cotton, not all tractors are three-wheeled:

And yet, an antediluvian rattling tractor with an outboard engine and a cage trailer with white clods of cotton wool behind the stern - in the fall, the same unhurried king of Central Asian roads as a timber carrier in the Russian North:

As I understand it, the gaps between the middle wheel and each of the two rear ones are made specifically for the row spacing in the cotton field:

They carry raw cotton, as it was collected from the fields - with dirt, straw and the remains of boxes:

They take it to the cotton ginning plants - an integral element of the Central Asian landscape. In the spring, they are, in fact, just platforms behind the fences, as if invisible, but in the fall, natural cotton hills grow on them:

The next few shots were filmed in Tajikistan, where cotton is harvested already at the end of August. Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and especially Turkmenistan grow their cotton regularly, but not as dramatically as Uzbekistan.

I did not have a chance to visit inside the cotton factories and see the process of cotton cleaning up close, although in Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan it might have been possible to ask for it. .

Only cotton with a thread length of 20 cm or more goes into textile production - the so-called cotton fiber, and this is about half of the volume of raw cotton. The other half goes either to cotton wool or to pyrotechnics - cotton was important element many types of smokeless powder.

Cotton plant in Uzbekistan. Stacks - "bales" are folded in a strictly defined way, and small passages are left inside them so that the cotton dries out in the hot sun and with internal air circulation. I don’t know for sure how they transport it from here:

A by-product of cotton is guzapaya, that is, brushwood used for firewood in the mahalla and village:

It burns beautifully, and besides, like wood, it is possible to produce paper from it, which was what the Uzbek authorities planned to develop in the first years of independence (apparently, not very successfully).

Finally - cotton in different types, not exported:

In the next part - about a much more blissful heritage of the Ferghana Valley: about silk.

FERGANISTAN-2016
, as well as .

Cotton is one of the best organic materials at all times human history used in various industries. The main consumer of fiber is the textile industry, which cannot be imagined without cotton. Fabrics made from this material have excellent characteristics.

Cotton over time remains in demand, as it was many centuries ago.

Description

Cotton is a fiber of plant origin that envelops the seeds of the cotton plant. It is one of the most important and widespread crops around the world. It occupies a leading position as the basis for the production of fabrics. There are dozens of species of this plant.

By external characteristics cotton grows like a shrub. The similarity is due to the presence of branches and leaves. good example serves as the following photo of cotton.

In fact, cotton, depending on the species, is woody or herbaceous plant. It takes root only in hot countries, it needs a warm and humid climate. Its height is from a meter to one and a half meters. their color also differ in varietal characteristics, they can be pollinated independently. The fruit is a cotton boll in which seeds and fibers ripen.

History

In order to find out how cotton grows, it is useful to read a little historical background about it.

Cotton cultivation has a long history. This is confirmed by excavations of ancient settlements. The country that started the development of cotton is India. It was there that the oldest samples of material and tools for its processing were found. Further, cotton fiber became widespread in Greece and the Arab countries. Excavations in China, Persia, Mexico, and Peru also speak of the cultivation of cotton several millennia BC.

From the countries that grow the crop, cotton products have spread to Asia and America. Independent cultivation of cotton by these countries began much later.

Before cultivation began in Europe, there were many legends about how cotton grows. To this day, several variants of names have survived in different cultures, as well as images according to the ideas of people.

Cotton cultivation

The period of maturation of cotton fiber varies depending on the variety: from 100 to 200 days.

Well-prepared, porous soil is essential for growing cotton fiber. The presence in it nutrients is of great importance for the full growth of the plant. Therefore, the land before sowing is enriched with various fertilizers.

Warm climatic conditions also play a huge role. Seeds can germinate at a temperature not lower than 15 degrees. For development and further flowering, the temperature should reach 30 degrees. Cotton needs open access to sunlight. In the shade, the plant may die.

Cotton plants consume a lot of water. Providing the plant with moisture should occur abundantly and constantly. At the same time, cotton is able to tolerate drought due to a well-developed root system. But under such conditions, the yield is reduced.

The ripening of cotton on the plant is uneven, and therefore the harvest takes place in several stages. Often, leaves are removed from it before harvesting, which can interfere with the harvesting process.

After maturation of the box with fiber, it opens. Cotton picking begins, which is carried out mechanically or manually. Boxes of ripe fiber, along with seeds, are plucked from the plant. Further, the raw material is cleaned from seeds, dust and debris, and transported to its destination.

Properties

Cotton fiber has a number of positive properties:

perfectly absorbs moisture;
does not cause allergies;
warms, keeps warm;
has high air permeability;
does not need complex care;
has a low cost;
Convenient for sewing various clothes.

Cotton also has several negative properties:

without adding it is crushed, stretched and thinner;
quickly loses color with a large access to sunlight;
loses properties with prolonged contact with water.

Application

Cotton fiber is used in various spheres of human activity.

First of all, cotton is used in the textile industry. From it fabrics of various characteristics and colors are produced. For example, satin, flannel, chintz and many others. Cotton fiber is used in the manufacture of threads, yarn, wadding, paper, and even explosives.

Cotton seeds are also used in industry. Some of them are being prepared for further landing. From the rest of the seeds, oil is squeezed out, which is eaten. Low quality oil is used for technical needs. The raw material left after oil extraction is rich in protein, so animal feed is made from it.

Of the dozens of varieties of cotton, several types are used for the manufacturing industry.

Information about how cotton grows, about its application in industry is interesting and important. This plant has played a large role in the history of mankind for many centuries.

Now cotton harvesting is in full swing in Uzbekistan. From whatever city you leave, just a few kilometers away you will see fields of dry bushes covered with cotton wool. Last Saturday, I left Tashkent in the direction of Samarkand in order to photograph the cleaning process.

Some general information for those who, like me, had never seen cotton growing before my trip to Uzbekistan.

Cotton grows in the fields on small bushes about waist high.

To put it simply, these are just pieces of cotton wool on branches.

Before harvest, water is not supplied to the fields. Therefore, the cotton plant dries up. The “cotton wool” itself ripens in the so-called box. In this photo, the box has dried up and opened (perhaps in reverse order).

This is the box I opened up myself. It was green and completely closed.

That day was not without adventure.

I left Tashkent and about 10 km from the city stopped near a large cotton field, where just a bunch of people were working. I approached the field and just managed to ask a couple of questions to the guys who worked there, and take a few shots, when a man approached me and said that it was strictly forbidden to film the cotton harvest. He asked who I was and what I was doing here. I said everything as it is - they say a tourist, taking pictures. A minute later, another man came up and introduced himself as the owner of the field, said that it was private property, photography was not allowed, and he called the police. I called on my mobile, two more arrived - one in civilian clothes, the second in uniform. The one in uniform showed his ID and called himself a district police officer. They started asking if I had permission, why I was taking pictures, and so on. They even said that now they would take me to the prosecutor’s office :) But I know that I didn’t do anything especially criminal and I have nothing to be afraid of. We stood, talked, they talked for a long time in Uzbek, the district policeman called someone on his mobile for a long time. As a result, they asked me to remove the four frames that I did. And they said that without official permission they could not allow me to take pictures. That permission must be obtained from the khokimiyat of the Tashkent region (such as the mayor's office or administration in Russian) from some Rustam-aka. Moreover, the man who advised me to do this asked me not to tell the Hakimiyat that it was he who sent me. Why it was forbidden to film the cotton harvest, he did not know. All this lasted no more than half an hour, and ended up with one of them giving me a lift to a taxi stand so that I could leave for Tashkent. But I did not go to Tashkent, but to the next field, where no one forbade filming.

The problem is that schoolchildren pick cotton in some fields in Uzbekistan.

Approximately 2 weeks a year, every day they go outside of school on the field. It would seem that there is such a thing in it - well, the kids will work with their hands, stay in the fresh air - they will be healthier. In the end, we, Russian schoolchildren, were also sent to weed carrots during summer practice at school, and I remember this fun time only with good feelings, and curricula can be redistributed. But all sorts of human rights activists use this as an opportunity to reproach Uzbekistan for using child labor. Therefore, the organizers of cleaning are not very fond of people with cameras. Be that as it may, no one forbade me to take pictures in the neighboring field.

The field size is 2.5 hectares. I counted 30 people who pick cotton, of which no more than 3 men, about 8 children, the rest are women.

Women cover their faces with scarves. Firstly, protecting from the sun, and secondly, to breathe less dust from dry land.

The collected cotton is folded into such a knot, which is tied to a belt.

When it's full enough, it's comfortable to sit on.

This woman picked 118 kilograms of cotton the previous day. Collectors are paid 130 soums for 1 kilogram. That is, over the past day, the woman earned about 15 thousand soums, which is about 6 dollars at the current rate.

I plucked one bush and scored this much. The leaves and the box are dry and prickly, so you need to work with gloves.

It is planned to harvest 120 tons of cotton from this field. So far, only 20 have been collected.

As I said, children help their parents and do not look tortured and oppressed.

Mother with daughter.

With daughter and son.

Write down the address where to send photos. I often do this - print photos, and then send them by regular mail. Sometimes this is the only way to persuade a person to take a picture.

It's funny how children's faces change when you take a picture of them. I took this picture unexpectedly for a boy.

And he had already managed to prepare for the next one - he stood at attention and assumed a serious expression on his face. By the way, not only children do this, but also many adults.

The collected cotton is carried to the trailer.

So much has been collected today.

Weigh.

And write down the results in a notebook.